What’s the real deal with Trump’s tax returns? As DC closed for a snow day, here are some men who never leave their posts. Insurance isn’t what most people think it is, and that’s what’s wrong with health care. Daily Features: Top Headlines, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

THE FOUNDATION

“A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.” —James Madison (1792)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

The Real Story on Trump’s Tax Return1

Tuesday evening, with much ballyhoo, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow revealed two pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return, which she claimed to have obtained under what can only be described as dubious circumstances. Maddow declared, “For some reason that we cannot discern, this document has been made available. It has surfaced. It has been handed to a reporter.” And what does the return show? Trump earned a lot of money — $150 million — and paid a lot in federal taxes — $38 million, or what amounts to about 25% of his income. Stop the presses!

Catching wind of the story, the White House preempted MSNBC by releasing a statement that included Trump’s earnings and taxes paid. The statement concluded, “Despite his substantial income figure and tax paid, it is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns. The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the President will focus on his, which includes tax reform that will benefit all Americans.”

During the primaries, we called for Trump to release his tax records2 for reasons of learning who and what he has supported, not to know how much he’s worth or whether he paid his “fair share” in taxes. We also noted then and will reiterate now that Trump is under no legal obligation to share his tax returns, irrespective of what previous presidential candidates have traditionally practiced. What is truly disconcerting is the growing notion that it’s totally acceptable for the mainstream media to obtain and disseminate illegally leaked confidential information in an effort to harm Trump.

This latest Leftmedia witch-hunt exposes yet again just how anti-Trump they are. Recall the MSM collective yawn over Barack Obama’s numerous nefarious connections3, such as Jeremiah Wright4 or Bill Ayers. Where was the dogged reporting by the MSM exposing Obama’s truly scandalous past associations? It was conveniently absent. In fact, great energy and effort was put into defending Obama against legitimate questions, often by dismissing them as merely the kooky concerns of the tinfoil hat club.

Now the Leftmedia is invested in the narrative of Trump being illegitimate, and no matter what the facts reveal, they have committed themselves to discrediting Trump at every conceivable opportunity. That’s what’s truly behind this tax story. And yet as has happened repeatedly, it’s proving only to blow up in their faces.

Slush Holidays at Taxpayer Expense5

By Mark Alexander

Yesterday afternoon I received a call from one of our contributing authors after he left work and was driving north on I-95 just south of Washington, DC. He found it humorous that there was not a single vehicle in the southbound lanes — normally a parking lot of rush-hour traffic. Today, Weather.com and other “weather news” outlets are doing their best to excuse all the hype they stirred up over the great March blizzard6. But the Daily Mail called winter storm Stella “The Blizzard that WASN’T,” while the New York Post declared “NYC Blizzard is a Dud.”

Fortunately, the DC media posted a “Snow Survival Guide7” ahead of the two inches of slush that besieged the nation’s capital yesterday, so all food market shelves were denuded of milk and bread.

Of course the 24-hour weather prognosticators face the same constraints as the rest of the 24-hour news recycling talkingheads — they are motivated, first and foremost, by market share and advertising revenues. In other words, they are driven by financial incentive, which is why they incessantly hype news — everything is a crisis, stay tuned 24/7! Of course there is rarely national news that rises to the level of the media’s hyperbolic “ALERT” bulletins. But in all fairness, the weather prognosticators have the task of trying to predict something, while the rest of the MSM are constantly rehashing news about something past — ad nauseam.

Top Headlines8

Schumer, who voted for the border wall in 2006, now threatens a government shutdown over funding it. (The Daily Signal9)

Policy: How the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is trying to kill the Second Amendment. (America’s 1st Freedom20)

Policy: America’s way ahead in Syria. (Critical Threats21)

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report22.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSISMaking Health Insurance Insurance Again23

By Louis DeBroux

The release this week of the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the GOP’s ObamaCare replacement24 bill brought on immediate condemnation, hyperventilation, and Chicken Little the-sky-is-falling theatrics from all the usual suspects in the Democrat Party and the Leftmedia (but we repeat ourselves).

According to the CBO, the GOP plan would reduce the deficit by several hundred billion dollars, but add 14 million to the ranks of the uninsured in 2018. Pretty horrible, right?

Not if we keep in mind the CBO’s track record, which is not very good. By law, the CBO must score legislation statically (essentially net-zero formulations) rather than dynamically (factoring in human behavioral responses to economic changes). Unable to factor in human behavior, CBO projections are generally off by a wide margin.

In 2009, the CBO predicted ObamaCare would cost taxpayers $900 billion over 10 years, but just two years later the projected costs had more than doubled. Likewise, the number of Americans added to the insurance rolls was a fraction of projections, and a sizeable chunk of those added were lumped into Medicaid, which is a taxpayer-funded welfare program, not insurance.

Lost in the discussion of premiums, enrollment rates, deductibles and so forth is the fact that ObamaCare was never an insurance program. Rather, it was a quasi-socialist health payment program, a temporary bridge to what Democrats actually wanted — single-payer, government-run socialized health care. ObamaCare was never intended to work; at least, not as it was sold to the stupid American people25.

As summarized brilliantly by Robert Tracinski26 at The Federalist, “The point of insurance is not that healthy people pay for sick people. … The point of health insurance is not to provide health care. The point is to hedge against financial risk. … You still set aside a certain amount every month, as you do with savings, but you control for the short-term risk of needing your benefits before you have fully paid for them. Some people will pay premiums for only a few months before they need the benefits. Others will pay for decades without needing them. You accept this because you don’t know ahead of time which one of those people you are going to be.”

“But you can make calculations about which one of those people you are likely to be,” Tracinski continues. “So you want your premiums to be correlated to your own level of risk and not just be a slush fund to be ‘shared’ with others, because that looks a whole lot like getting ripped off. If you find yourself required to pay extremely high premiums while you’re still young and healthy and with a healthy lifestyle, and therefore with a very low risk of using much of your coverage, then you may well decide you’re better off without insurance.”

By definition, ObamaCare can’t be called insurance because it prohibits insurers from basing premiums on risk factors such as age, race (certain races have higher likelihoods of contracting certain diseases than others), lifestyle (smoking, drinking alcohol, and promiscuous sexual behavior all significantly increase health risks), etc. So a chain-smoking 50-year-old man could not be charged much more than a 23-year-old female triathlete. Insurers were also not allowed to deny coverage, or charge higher premiums, for those with pre-existing conditions.

This creates a perverse incentive for both younger people who were unlikely to be sick and for people living an unhealthy lifestyle to go without insurance, knowing they could wait until they needed costly medical care before signing up. At worst they would have to pay a small penalty, which would be more than offset by the money saved from not paying monthly premiums for years.

Without cost being tied to risk, there is little incentive for people to be responsible and to sign up for insurance. In the end, the insurance companies, who salivated at the thought of government forcing everyone to buy their product, lost billions of dollars as they saw primarily sicker and older people signing up, without the young and healthy paying premiums to offset the costs.

That’s why 18 of the 23 ObamaCare co-ops have already gone bankrupt, and why major insurers are pulling out of markets left and right.

Fixing the failures of the health insurance market will require a return to free market principles. It will require insurance to be insurance, not a slush fund shoveling money from the young and healthy to the older and infirm. It means returning to a model where we pay for routine care out of pocket27, and use insurance as it is meant to be used — namely, to deal with unforeseen, catastrophic health problems. How much would auto insurance cost if government required it to cover new tires, oil changes, and windshield wipers?

Real reform will require risk-based premiums, and addressing the issue of pre-existing conditions, which would be better addressed by moving those people into a high-risk pool subsidized by the states. That’s welfare, not insurance, but it would make risk assessment more reality-based and lower overall costs.

It will require a firm spine and some political capital, but our leaders need to have a frank discussion with the American people28 and disabuse them of the notion of an eternal, cost-free gravy train. We are at $20 trillion in debt, and rising. Major entitlements are the primary drivers. We can either responsibly address the crisis now, or wait until the house of cards collapses. Prudence and wisdom dictates that we act now.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

The American Melting Pot29 — Is it demographics or an idea? A look at what makes us great. Just What the Doctor Ordered30 — Trump’s choice to head the FDA will bring badly needed reform to the agency.

John Stossel: “As this week’s storm approached the East Coast, the media reverted to breathless hype: ‘monster storm … very dangerous.’ Here I blame my beloved free market: Predicting scary weather works. Viewers tune in. What galls me more is the reporters' government-centric thinking. ‘Everything is closed,’ they say. ‘Employees can’t get to work.’ But the corner grocery stayed open. So did many gas stations and restaurants. Why is it that when government buildings close, so many private businesses stay open? Because their own money is at stake. The store’s employees probably make less money than government workers. They are less likely to own all-wheel-drive cars. But they get to work. Some sleep there. Their own money is on the line. Reporters don’t think about the distinction.”

SHORT CUTS

Non Compos Mentis: “When someone gets shot by a gun with a silencer, it’s quiet. Witnesses might not hear. Police will be less likely to track down the shooter.” —Kirsten Gillibrand on suppressors, a.k.a. “silencers” that don’t actually make anything silent (“And you can’t scream for help because the silencer pulls sound out of your mouth.” —Frank Fleming)

Belly laugh of the week: “[My young son] now does an impression where whenever I’m bothering him he says, ‘Fake news.’” —CNN’s Jake Tapper (Smart kid!)

The Snowflake Monologues: “I’d like to share with you an experience I had today. It’s uncomfortable and scary for me… An older man with white hair came up to me at my seat today at a basketball game. He said, ‘May I take your picture?’ I said ‘Yes.’ … He said to me with open hostility as he was backing away, ‘We like Trump.’ … I feel very sad that this happened, and frankly scared.” —Ashley Judd

Flip-Flop Minority Leader: “If Republicans insist on inserting poison pill riders such as defunding Planned Parenthood, building a border wall, or starting a deportation force, they will be shutting down the government and delivering a severe blow to our economy.” —Chuck Schumer (“In 2006, Schumer was among 26 Democrats who voted for the Secure Fence Act … that was passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by President George W. Bush.” —The Daily Signal’s Rachel del Guidice)

Hyperbole: “If this [health care] legislation is passed, and millions of people are thrown off of health insurance, not able to get to a doctor when they must, thousands of Americans will die.” —Bernie Sanders (They won’t, but thousands of people actually would die under Sanders' socialist vision.)

And last… “This CBO thing about 14 million people ‘losing’ coverage is like saying people who voluntarily leave the army ‘lose’ their base housing.” —Jonah Goldberg

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et FidelisManaging Editor Nate Jackson

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